Things that go bang in the night....

[recycled sixtie]

I hear a bang at 130 in the morning. Thinking that it is the furnace but it was not. I checked outside the front window and see a white car in a front neighbour's yard.
I keep looking and shortly after I see a person running away from the car going west.
The lights are left on. I phone 911 and tell them what has happened. I go out and meet the police.

They say it is a rent a car. Smell of perfume in the car apparently but not alcohol.
Wife slept through it. Car gets towed an hour or so later. I go back to bed. Rent a car bus. will not be happy!

Not sure what kind of car it was.

[biosurfer1]

Person running was probably trying to get to a phone to report the car stolen

[onewhippedpuppy]

I'm guessing drunk, and yes they will probably report it stolen to try and get off of the hook.

[URY914]

Hey, that's my car!

[GH85Carrera]

Right before I married my now wife the mailbox at her house was mowed down by some neighborhood kids with their jacked up pickup. They hit all the mailboxes on that street. The house was in the middle of a typical surban neighborhood and just two houses away from a 4 way stop sign. 25 MPH speed limit and a stop sign coming up, it was not an accident.

My FIL was much like myself and when he rebuilt things he over engineered and overbuilt to make a fix that will not need to fixed ever again. He went to a local oilfield supply shop he knew. They cut him a piece of 8 inch heavy wall drilling pipe to be 8 feet long. He brought down his post hole drill and dug a 4 foot hole and set in in concrete. Lets just say the mailbox was on a sturdy and secure pole. I was always hoping the same morons would deliberately try to run it over. We sold the house before that ever happened but the guy across the street was a friend.

He called me to say in the middle of the night there was a lot of racket and some local punks figured mowing down mail boxes was fun. They mowed down several of the neighbors mail boxes. Then there was a very loud ker-wang! The jacked up Jeep was stopped dead in its tracks and wrapped around the mail box. EVERYONE except the kid and his parents thought it was funny. The police of course received a stolen vehicle report so they did not write any tickets. It was just a coincidence that the kid that drove the Jeep had a broken nose and busted lip.

[LEAKYSEALS951]

The "someone stole my vehicle" must be the oldest trick in the book.
Just the other day, I was thinking of some guy I met in when I was a teenager who claimed he did it.

Seems like cops would have had enough of that, and come up with some way to deter that type of claim.

[Amail]

My story is more bang in the day. I was settling down to watch an F1 race I'd Tivo'd and heard a loud couple bangs, as though someone went too fast over a speed bump towing a trailer. I turned my attention out the window to see what it was, and I saw our power lines snap straight, then slacken, then drop to the ground!

Some yayhoo who lives up the street apparently drove straight instead of following the slight bend in the road. Mowed over my neighbor's mailbox, then straight into the wooden pole that terminated the power, cable, and telephone lines on our street.

I ran outside to see if anyone was hurt and got there just as the guy, dazed, started getting out of his car. I took him away from the power lines and tried to assess his condition, which wasn't too bad really. He was then very anxious to retrieve his cell phone from the car. I told him no way are you getting near that car again, partly because I was worried about the downed power lines but also because I suspected the phone would be on the texting screen with half a message typed. If that were the result of texting and driving, I wanted the cops to make that connection.

I don't know what ever became of the guy, if he was ticketed, anything.

[recycled sixtie]

Originally Posted by biosurfer1

Person running was probably trying to get to a phone to report the car stolen

Interesting. From the time I called 911 the response time was about 5 minutes. However the police did not seem interested in tracking down the driver with dogs.
Were just interested in talking to the gal whose property it landed on.

Two police women came after. I talked to them and I said I had already given my report to the police by phone. They were the canine unit but they did not seem interested in giving chase.

[GWN7]

There is a house a couple blocks away that is on the end of a T. Forced left or right. He got tired of people parking their cars in his living room so being a railway worker he got some used rail and sunk 10' lengths of it encased in 8" of concrete with a heavy chain strung between. No more problems with cars hitting his house.

[Shifter]

And I opened this thread expecting a picture of someone's wife...

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by GWN7

There is a house a couple blocks away that is on the end of a T. Forced left or right. He got tired of people parking their cars in his living room so being a railway worker he got some used rail and sunk 10' lengths of it encased in 8" of concrete with a heavy chain strung between. No more problems with cars hitting his house.

I had a friend with a house like that. He tried to plant trees but they would never get big because some idiot would crash a car into them and flatten the tree. He finally put up a LARGE berm of dirt and built a rail road tie beam wall around it. The dirt had not even fully settled when a large delivery truck tested the build quality. That truck was indeed stopped by a wall of dirt and rail road ties. The entire family was home in the living room right were the truck would have plowed through.

[greglepore]

Last time I heard a bang in the nite it was a 22 yr old kid on a new to him Gixxer 650 against a 30in oak across the street at 3 am. Was obvious that cpr wasn't called for. Hope I don't hear that clatter again for a long time.

[ckelly78z]

I came home from work one day last Winter and found a car in my ditch that the kid was just getting out of. He slid on the ice, and tapped my mailbox enough to leave a scuff and scratch on the two 4x4 treated lumber posts that hold it up. His car, on the other hand, had the entire "endura" front end torn off and hanging there, with bits and pieces of figerglass that I kept finding as I mowed throughout the Summer. Now if I could just keep the snowplows at bay !

[id10t]

This is the curve in front of our house - if you go straight instead of turning you end up in my yard. In the 16 years we've lived here, 23 times someone has missed the curve to some degree. One guy managed this feat 3 times, but to be fair he got further thru the curve each time before hitting my fence. No deaths since I've lived there but two close calls. There was one death a few years before we moved in, one of the folks who live down the dirt road you can see on the right their son was drunk, had been depressed, and got up enough speed that when he hit the trees the front end of his car broke up and a headlight ended up about 50 feet beyond the fence line...



Behind that road sign you can see are some pretty big oaks with not a lot of space between. One person (dunno who, we were out of town and came back to a trashed fence and marks all over the yard from a tow truck) managed to fit his Nissan Altima between the trees. Took off both side mirrors and some side trim though... a few inches either direction he would've hit a tree.

Issue is this road is a "off the main way" between two small towns, one of which has a bar and the other one doesn't. So all the folks in small town #2 drive to #1, drink, then head home... taking the back way of course to avoid the law... unfortunately for them when they hit my fence I have a habit of greeting them wearing boxers or maybe shorts, carrying a phone while calling 911 and carrying a flashlight and whatever spoon happened to be handiest as I'm headed out the front door. Why the gun? That guy that hit my fence 3 times, first time he got quite belligerent and threatened to kick my ass if I called 911.

There have also been several close calls which resulted in my mail box being taken out, a short decorative wall on either side of the driveway entrance, etc.

[Mark Henry]

When I lived in the city a drunk took out the fire hydrant on the front corner of my lot. We were sleeping, 3AM, no more than 30' away in the 2nd story front room with the windows open. BOOM!
The flood took out my front lawn, sidewalk, curb and a part of the road right in front of our house that we were trying to sell. The town was good in that everything was repaired in only 3 weeks even new sod etc.
I thought our insurance would have to pay for the lawn, but the town covered it all.

Same deal...Drunk, tried to claim it stolen, ended up in the slammer, etc.

Sold the house and moved to the quiet country...now it's the damn crickets keeping us awake in the summer.
Spring peepers (frogs) are only weeks away now.

[Mark Henry]

Oh and at least it wasn't you wife, waking you up at 1AM, telling you there's a drunk midget asleep on your front porch on a -25 degree winter night.

That's another city story....

[recycled sixtie]

Originally Posted by Mark Henry

Oh and at least it wasn't you wife, waking you up at 1AM, telling you there's a drunk midget asleep on your front porch on a -25 degree winter night.

That's another city story....

Similar to this last week at the end of the block a woman gets in her van and finds a man sleeping in it. They park both their vans outside and must have forgotten to lock it. Of course the double garage is full due to it being used for storage.

[techweenie]

When I lived on Mulholland Drive, there was one summer when 5 cars went over the edge on the same curve - 1/8 mile West of me. It was so bad that one night, before they had retrieved the car 100 feet down the slope, another went off and collided with it... No deaths.